In the news again today, Senators are arguing about a controversial bill to change the national anthem, but the politicians and others who say that there is a grammatical problem with the proposed revision are wrong. I don’t have any objections to the proposed revision. It would be different if the government were trying to revise one of the objectional poems by Irving Layton. The anthem is official and meant to be sung together to encourage citizens to feel that they are part of an imagined community, so inclusive lyrics are a good idea. The proposed revision, in fact, is still too martial and religious for my taste, but that's a topic for a different post. This post is about grammar and controversy, that old pair. Here is the start of the anthem—objectionable to someone in every line, I know, but culminating in the one under debate today:

I can explain the first two lines, but that’s probably not what you want right now.* You want the debate about the third one: “True patriot love in all thy sons command.” To be gender-neutral, Bill C-201 proposes this revision: “True patriot love in all of us command.” ﻿According to Senator Michael MacDonald in the CBC News story linked above and below, various people, supposedly including English and linguistics professors, have agreed with MacDonald﻿, who protests that the revision is grammatically incorrect. It’s not. It’s a complete sentence, albeit in archaic syntax: an example of the re-ordering of words that is sometimes necessary to position rhymes at the end of lines, as with “land” and “command.” Adjusting the syntax but keeping all the same words, the line is still a grammatically correct sentence of the imperative type: “Command true patriot love in all of us.” The song begins by addressing Canada as if the country were a person (in a technique called apostrophe: "O Canada!"), and that person carries over to the third line as someone who could command someone else. It’s correct (if not politically) in the official lyrics, too: “Command true patriot love in all thy sons.” When Senator Michael MacDonald says, “The proper and only acceptable pronoun substitution for the phrase ‘All thy sons command’ is ‘All of our command,’” he is neglecting another “proper” reading: that Canada is the commander. His interpretation is fine, more or less, and we can discern it by adjusting the syntax again: “All thy sons command true patriot love.” In this case, we can interpret the line to mean that our boys are growing into authority by telling others, or inspiring others, to care for them nationalistically. Another interpretation is that we are in control of our own love. Also in this case, however, the preposition “in” mysteriously disappears. In my view, MacDonald has to explain the use of that preposition (or why it can just vanish) before he claims that his reading is the “only” one.

* The song begins with what’s called an apostrophe—not the punctuation mark, but an address to someone or something. It’s part of a tradition of addressing sublime things, sometimes including the nation, especially if the nation is ruled by a king and the King is close to God, who (you might say) commands sublimity. It’s sometimes called the “apostrophic O,” as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind." Here at home, the addressee is Canada, and the first line of the song is an incomplete sentence only if we neglect other types of sentences. The second line is the same: technically a fragment (no subject or verb) but excusable because of its exhortative, exclamatory role. If someone bumps into you at the grocery store and he’s the one to yell “Hey!”, you can’t say it’s not a grammatically correct response.

How to cite this blog in MLA format: Deshaye, Joel. “The Grammar of the National Anthem in Canada." Publicly Interested, 4 April 2017, www.publiclyinterested.weebly.com.